Elan Pickup Switching scheme

Anything about Elan model guitars
Post Reply
al_lighton
Heartfield Novice
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 10:24 pm
United States of America

Elan Pickup Switching scheme

Post by al_lighton »

I have a couple Elans, and was never sure exactly how the pickups were wired, but had a pretty good guess. So I buzzed out the switch with a meter today. The Elans have two 4 wire humbuckers with Black and blue end wires, and orange and yellow wires where the two coils connect to each other. On the neck humbucker, the blue wire is hot, the black wire is ground. On the bridge humbucker, it is the opposite, blue is ground, black is hot.

The 5 position switch does this (1 is bridge position, 5 is neck position)

1) Bridge Humbucker, Neck Off
2) Bridge Single Coil (Or/Yellow grounded), Neck Single coil (Or/Yellow hot)
3) Bridge Humbucker, Neck Humbucker
4) Bridge Single Coil (Or/Yellow Hot), Neck Single Coil (Or/Yellow Grounded)
5) Bridge Off, Neck Humbucker

So it's pretty much how I thought it would be. There is never a position where you hear just one single coil pickup. I'm thinking that the guitar would be more versatile if one of the 2 or 4 positions was just a one single coil without all the phasing that you get when two are on. So I'm considering making that mod on one of my Elans to see how it sounds.
al_lighton
Heartfield Novice
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 10:24 pm
United States of America

Re: Elan Pickup Switching scheme

Post by al_lighton »

I didn't remove the pickups from the guitar, so I wasn't sure whether the blue wire is on the coil with the adjuster screws or the coil with the plain pole pieces. And I don't know if the bridge and neck pickups are identical or if one is wound differently than the other. As installed from the factory, the pole screws are closest to the bridge on the bridge pickup, and closest to the neck on the neck pickup.

But if they are wound identically, and the blue wire is the screw pole piece coil, the way that the pickups are wired into the guitar means that in position 2, the two single coil pickups (Neck closest to bridge, Bridge closest to neck) are on and in phase with each other, and in position 4, the other two single coils with the adjuster screws (neck closest to neck, bridge closest to bridge) are on and also in phase with each other. I tapped on the pole pieces with a piece of metal to confirm this, so the blue wire must be on the screw pole coil. The single coils aren’t connected with the out of phase sound that you get with a strat in the 2 and 4 position. That probably makes sense, because if it had been wired that way, there would probably be a significant volume drop in that position.

It wouldn’t be too hard to make it so that a push/pull pot switch could turn off one pickup in the 2 or 4 position. Since the switches are DPDT, it would be fairly trivial to make it so that it is just like normal in the in position, and just the bridge single coil in the 2 position and just the neck single coil in the 4 position, in the out position.
Post Reply

Return to “Elan”